In Linux you can install a program using installers that have been created by the different distributions such as RedHat or Debian to name a couple or you can obtain the source code and install the program yourself, something you cannot do with Windows.

The source code for a program usually comes in a tar, Tape ARchive, gz, Gnu Zip, format sometimes called a tarball.
This tarball usually contains some files to help you take the source code and put the whole thing together as a working program.

There are three steps that are usually, but not always, followed to compile the program depending how it is put together. If it is a large program with lots of different files it need these processes to automate the installation as doing it by hand would be too time consuming and prone to errors.

The usual steps are Configure, for which a configure file is supplied, next is Make, which follows the instructions in a supplied makefile and yhen Make Install which installs all the parts where they are designed to go according to the creater/s of the program.

If the instructions tell you to run ' make ' and then ' make install ' these are the commands that you use but for these commands to run the tools need to be installed in your version of Linux, at present Puppy does not have these tools installed therefor when you try to run these commands Puppy does not know what you are talking about so it cannot follow those orders.

If you wish to have programs that you have downloaded in .tar.gz format and that require compiling you will need a Linux distrubition that has the required tools installed such as Mandrake or Vector Linux or one of the bigger distributions.

The reason Puppy does not have all these tools is because they occupy a fair amount of disk space and as Barry set out to create a small version of Linux these and many larger programs and utilities could not be included.

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